NRG Sells Petra Nova Stake For $3.6 Million; CCS "Success Story" Had Cost $1 Billion

[hatrack]

NRG Energy Inc. just sold its 50 percent stake in the world’s largest carbon capture plant for only about $3.6 million, less than a half-percent of the Texas project’s roughly $1 billion construction costs. The sale leaves JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. as the sole owner of the 240-MW coal-fired Petra Nova power plant. S&P Market Intelligence described the deal as “a setback for supporters of carbon-capture projects at existing fossil fuel plants.” It is far more.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sank $195 million into the carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant, hoping to demonstrate the potential for the technology to counteract greenhouse gas emissions of coal plants. The NRG fire sale of its half of the project is a declaration that the taxpayer investment was a technological failure and a financial loss. The U.S. government needs to ask hard questions about investing more taxpayer dollars in CCS for coal plants. The CCS technology used in the Petra Nova project was not new. The DOE called it “proven.” But it did not work as well as promised. Other CCS projects attempted at power plants have failed, as well.

The Petra Nova facility began operations in 2017. The CCS equipment was installed to capture CO2 from a slipstream of the W.A. Parish Unit 8’s flue gas. The captured CO2 traveled via 80-mile pipeline to an oilfield near Houston for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations to increase extraction. Petra Nova’s target CCS capture rate was 90 percent. NRG claims it met the target. But Petra Nova’s owners have never provided the actual data behind that claim. Emissions data for Parish Unit 8 reported to the EPA suggests the actual CO2 capture rate was substantially lower than 90%, perhaps as low as 65% to 70%. And the average capture rate does not include emissions from the gas-fired combustion turbine used to power the facility. Adding those emissions lowers the overall on-site capture rate to perhaps as low as 55% to 58%.

Petra Nova also was expected to be in operation some 85% of the time but failed to meet its target because so many technical problems and so much downtime were experienced—not just in the CCS facility and in Parish Unit 8, but also in the CO2 pipeline and the oilfield where the captured CO2 was injected. Similar problems can be expected to affect any carbon capture project, especially at an aging coal plant. The unit was taken offline in May 2020 and remains down. JX Nippon now says it anticipates bringing Petra Nova back online in the second quarter of 2023 but has not provided an exact schedule or cost estimate.

EDIT

https://ieefa.org/resources/ill-fated-petra-nova-ccs-project-nrg-energy-throws-towel

[Midnight Writer]

1. Carbon capture is a scam. An empty promise to limit carbon to delay the inevitable demise of fossil.